The Mullica Hill Library will host the Prove-it program at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 13, in order to teach kids from 9 to 12 and teenagers from 13 to 17 how to combat misinformation, identify AI usage in photos and talk about the degradation of search engines.
The event is held monthly and is instructed by Maddy Brozusky, of the library’s youth services department, once a prevention educator for a crisis center in Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, called Victims Resource Center. She discussed the topic of online exploitation at a variety of schools from the elementary level to college.
“My goal is to nurture a better relationship between patrons and the content they come across every day,” Brozusky said. “Rates of depression, anxiety, and a general sense of gloom around the future are ever growing in our young people. If we can get them to realize a lot of the things they are seeing on TikTok, Instagram and X are not real accounts of the world around them, I hope to see those rates go down, if only in our tiny town.
“Prove-It aims to be a solution,” she added, “and nothing is more important than that to me. Libraries exist to be a source of knowledge. It is imperative that we assist the community in differentiating what knowledge is factual and what is fantasy.”
Each Prove-it program has three parts. The first is a warm-up, as Brozusky described it, where students have to identify whether an image is real or AI generated by going through tells that reveal information. The second portion of a session is called “Don’t take the bait,” where participants will look at social-media posts made to incite a specific emotion, how the posts are usually made up and how to dissect the portions that appear suspect.
The third part of the program ortion has students analyze a child-friendly, social-media campaign chosen by Brozusky and research it to determine its veracity. Such campaigns can be more hurtful than funny and they vary each month. This month’s program asks the question, “Was Hellen Keller a real person, and did she do all of the feats she’s accredited for?”
Particpants can register their kids for the free Prove-it event on the GCLS website and adults are expected to accompany them to the library.
“While scrolling through X, Reddit or TikTok, one can often see something posted that was blatant rage bait or obvious misinformation, and upon opening its comment section, participants will find thousands of people agreeing with the post or fighting for their lives that OP (original poster) is wrong,” Brozusky explained. “In my corner of the internet, it is a near daily occurrence.
“I believe this is not okay,” she added. “It contributes heavily to the amount of people who cannot discern fact from fiction. In my opinion, the only way to get it to stop is to educate internet users on how these scams work, who is being affected and why they are happening at all.
“‘Don’t do that, ‘just scroll past it’ and ‘kids shouldn’t be online anyway’ are phrases we hear far too often, but in my opinion, they are not viable solutions to raising tech-literate kids.”
